According to the 2018 IBM funded Ponemon Institute’s Cost of a Data Breach study, it takes an average of 196 days for companies to detect a data breach. Research shows that the average cost of a data breach for American companies is an estimated $7.91 million.

Data security is a very important priority for business, especially if you have a massive amount of sensitive data. Here are three data security tips that will help protect your company.

Tip #1: Prepare an IT disaster recovery plan

One of the first things you should do is develop an IT disaster recovery plan. A proper IT disaster recovery plan will give everyone guidelines on what to do in the case of an emergency. This can really be helpful if your IT network, computers or applications are exposed to malware, ransomware, hackers and other types of cyber threats.

Tip #2: Ask your employees to change their passwords frequently

Another tip is to require your employees to change their passwords frequently to prevent unauthorized access. Advise them to create passwords that are long and contain a mix of different numbers and symbols. Employees should also never use the same password for multiple websites.

Tip #3: Destroy your infected technology

If your company’s IT has been compromised you should be proactive and destroy the computer’s hard disk. Our MediaVise® HDD Destroyer is a computer hard disk drive destroyer that is perfect for commercial items. All you have to do is feed the hard disk into the device and it will crush it so that no one can ever use it again. The MediaVise® can also destroy circuit boards, flash drives and cell phones.

Hire us to keep your organization secure

To learn more about how we can help keep your organization secure, please contact us today. Our company, Phiston Technologies, Inc. is the leading provider of data security products and services in the state of Florida. We have a wide range of innovative patented data destruction products including the MediaVise®, MediaVise® Compact, and MediaDice®. All of our tools can help keep your organization safe by removing compromised data and destroying corrupted files and equipment.

Each year, millions of computers are retired. Sometimes their components, such as memory cards, power supplies, and other bits and pieces like fans and cases are recycled by intrepid IT workers. But a lot of the time, the units are disposed of whole, making their ways into some of the least secure environments on the planet when it comes to data security. The landfill is not a secure method of containing and erasing data. All it takes is for one unscrupulous person to go dumpster diving, and the entirety of the contents of that hard drive are theirs for the keeping.

Some people might want to keep their information secure, so they use a program that deletes their hard disks, solid state devices, or other storage media. These methods are no more secure than just throwing a hard disk into the trash can. All a program does to delete information is to tell the computer operating system to ignore the breaks in the data. It would be much like removing all the punctuation from a book and telling someone it had been erased. This is simply not the case.

In order to completely erase and secure the data on a hard disk, you must destroy the physical media of the hard disk itself. To put it simply, this can be a dangerous undertaking, not to mention without the proper tools it could also be ineffective. Phiston Technologies specializes in providing a 100% reliable method of destroying a hard disks: the hard disk crusher. With several to choose from, the method is basically the same. The hard disk is removed from the computer or server rack and it is fed into a the crusher. Thousands of pounds of pressure, as well as carbide reinforced teeth puncture and crush the media, mangling it to the point where it could never be read by any device ever again. The pieces are safely discarded in a collection bin for further disposal. The process also works for cell phones, CD/DVDs, floppy disks, thumb drives, and other SSD cards and devices.

So before you make the mistake of trying any other method of erasing your hard disks, contact us to see how the professionals in data security get the job done.

When it comes to data security, there are a significant number of approaches that need to be taken in order to ensure that information does not get stolen due to lackluster security measures. As far as sensible security measures are concerned, one basic thing to make sure to check and double-check is the security and complexity of the passwords protecting your data.

Many people do not make the effort to utilize complex enough passwords which frequently leads to important data being easily accessible by people you would like to keep out of that data. This is emphasized by the fact that some of the most common passwords currently employed are the easiest to figure out. This list includes passwords like “password”, “123456”, “2580” or sometimes the name of the person whose data is being protected by the password in question.

If you want to ensure data safety, one of the most important things to do is to have a good password that cannot be easily guessed. Besides just having a complex password though, it is important to make sure that the physical location of the computer or hard drive where this data is kept is itself secure. Having a good password is fine but the better approach is to not have to rely on it. If a potential data thief can’t get to the drive or computer in question to access the data they want to steal then it will be that much more difficult for them to steal your data.

However, not all data will be stored locally and sometimes data employs cloud storage so there will not be a lot you can do about the security measures excluding passwords and encryption. If that is the case, it is vital that you make sure to know who has access to the data and make sure that only trustworthy individuals are able to access it so that an untrustworthy employee can’t just log in, make a copy and walk out with critical data one day.

If you need more information on data security and best practices for making sure that your data stays safe and secure then please contact us today for more information.

From the biggest international corporations on Earth all the way down to tiny local businesses, every organization is going to have to upgrade their equipment at some point in order to remain relevant. When the time comes to make that upgrade, you will need to have some way to make sure that your data remains secure. The best way to do this is to invest in secure hard drive destruction.

After all, if your hard drives have been destroyed, then they can no longer be accessed which is a far better method for making that data inaccessible than relying on your ability to create strong passwords and just hoping that those passwords won’t end up getting broken. There is a wealth of data on your hard drives and leaving it on there when you dispose of those drives is just asking for your security to be compromised.

You might be wondering why you would need data destruction services, especially if your business is small and appears to not be the kind of place that data thieves would target. Well, here are just a few things that potential data thieves might be interested in acquiring from your data stores.

Employee Records

As a business, your data storage will almost certainly include records for current and previous employees. These records can include things like their address, phone number, bank account pin numbers and so on. Letting this sort of data get stolen can result in your employees becoming victims of identity theft, having their bank accounts hacked and an increase in the amount of spam mail they are subjected to. In order to avoid this kind of thing, it’s important to keep these records secure and to wipe out your drives when they are no longer being used.

Customer Information

The amount of information largely depends on how large your business is but you will probably keep records of business transactions, payment info, addresses and possibly social security numbers at the very least. The issue here is that you aren’t just putting yourself at risk by failing to have this data stored securely but potentially putting customers at risk as well.

Unless you’re doing business out of a wooden box with nothing but cash and everything you record is kept in paper form (which is a bad idea but for different reasons) you are likely to have all of this and more in your records at some point. While you may be tempted to try and save money by just storing this data away and not disposing of the drives or by destroying the drives yourself and hoping for the best, this really is just asking for trouble. Data present on drives that have not been properly disposed of can still be accessed given enough time and effort so it’s in your best interests to make sure your hard drives are properly disposed of.

Luckily, you can rely on us here at Phiston to provide solutions to your secure data destruction needs. Contact us today to find out which of our products is right for you and your business.

ITAMs or IT Asset Managers bear a great responsibility—planning for the proper disposal of any devices that contain or may contain sensitive or protected information. For many years, simply erasing hard drives and deleting files was considered to be sufficient, which is why companies like SpaceX trust our processes. More recently, however, data leaks have come from storage devices that were improperly disposed of.

How can one ensure that a storage device is fully sanitized? How about shredding it into tiny bits of material, case and all? Degaussing a hard drive disrupts the magnetic striping if it is done completely, rendering the drive useless. Crushing and shredding digital storage, however, offers physical evidence that the media can never be recovered.

The NSA as well as large companies such as SpaceX have intensive requirements for the sanitization of storage devices because their intellectual property is so valuable and sensitive. Our MediaDice and MediaVise lines work wonders for complete and total disruption of Solid State Drives (SSDs) for which degaussing simply does not work.

Our MediaVise HDD line causes total destruction of HDD platter and casing components by forcing large steel blades into the media with 20 tons of pressure. The platter will have been warped through not only the intense pressure but also distorted by the heat of friction. The surface will be rendered entirely inoperable.

While degaussing may yield a higher price for salvage and per-unit recycle value, the return on recycled drives is much lower than the cost of a data breach like those that Target and other businesses have faced in the recent years. Don’t sit on mountains of End of Life (EoL) storage devices or take the erasure route. You cannot be certain that they are thoroughly sanitized.

Contact us and see how we can help you prevent any compromise to your Data Loss Prevention (DLP) plans.